NYC

NYC; Golden Oldie From Pataki: Death Ditty

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: June 16, 1998

IT is axiomatic in show business that if you want to be sure to keep the audience, stick with what has worked before. Gov. George E. Pataki is showing that the rules are pretty much the same in politics.

The death penalty for this Governor is what ''Hello Dolly'' is for Carol Channing, a refrain that he hopes the crowd will never tire of, no matter how familiar it has become. Banging the drum for capital punishment paid off for him in 1994, and he is doing an encore as he seeks re-election.

Mr. Pataki was exultant 10 days ago when a Brooklyn jury made Darrel K. Harris, a convicted triple murderer, the first person to face a lethal injection under New York State's death penalty law of 1995. ''This proves,'' he said, ''that we were right in seeking to pass this law.''

Fresh from that triumph, and amply patting himself on the back for New York's sharp drop in violent crime, the Governor asked last week for legislation to make it easier than ever for juries to put criminals to death. He proposed expanding the categories of murderers eligible for a fatal needle at the Green Haven prison. Thrill killers, for example, would be added to the list, along with those who kill for insurance money or an inheritance.

How much of a public-safety menace those particular villains are is not clear. There are no signs of a big outbreak of New Yorkers bopping spouses on the head to cash in on their life insurance. But the Governor is convinced that the capital punishment law he signed in 1995 has reduced crime, so full steam ahead. ''As that success continues, we must continue to do even more,'' he said.

It will be left to others to speculate on whether he means business or is dabbling in the politics of death. If he is serious, some lawmakers' aides said, he has an odd way of showing it, submitting his bills just as the Legislature is about to fold its tent.

It will also be left to others to debate whether the Governor deserves the credit he claims for plummeting crime. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani may have other thoughts, not to mention former Police Commissioner William J. Bratton and his strategist, Jack Maple. After all, the state can thank New York City for most of its decline in murders.

The concern here is with the Pataki exacta coupling capital punishment and lower crime.

In fact, the murder rate in the city was dropping well before Mr. Pataki -- and, for that matter, Mr. Giuliani -- took office. Also, the decline was more rapid in the two years before the new death penalty (39 percent) than in the two years that followed (35 percent).

IF capital punishment is such a devastating crime-buster, how is it that, from 1995 to 1997, murders fell in the Bronx by 36 percent and in Manhattan by 39 percent? In both boroughs, the district attorneys have yet to seek death, and they make abundantly clear they consider it a waste of crime-fighting resources.

The borough with the smallest percentage decline in those two years happened to be Brooklyn, where District Attorney Charles J. Hynes has sought death five times, far more than any other prosecutor in the state. To use the Governor's logic, murder should be disappearing much faster in Brooklyn than in Manhattan or the Bronx.

But the opposite is true. The 1995-97 decline was only 29 percent. Not that Mr. Hynes is surprised. He himself calls the capital punishment law ''a sham.''

The reality, reflected in data from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, is that the average murder rate in capital-punishment states is double that of the 12 states without a death chamber.

And consider Philadelphia. No district attorney in the country has been more aggressive than that city's Lynne Abraham in asking for the death penalty. Yet for the entire decade the number of murders has stayed stubbornly above 400 a year, a rate now nearly three times that of New York's.

''Even the Philadelphia D.A.'s office doesn't make the argument that the death penalty lowers the crime rate,'' said Robert Dunham, director of the Center for Legal Education, Advocacy and Defense Assistance, a nonprofit group that represents Philadelphians sitting on death row. (The city has more people on death row, 120, than 25 states.)

''What the death penalty does,'' he said, ''is provide the public with the illusion of control, and a mechanism to express its outrage over things it cannot control.''